/dev/fort

Lazy registration is easy

This article was published byJames Ayletton
Friday, July 24, 2009 at 20:00.

While working on the /dev/fort 2 project, we decided we should allow as much playing with the site as possible before requiring people to sign up. This is usually referred to as lazy registration, so we needed a way of managing this; I wrote a Django extension to do this, and later wrote an article on using it.

You don’t have to register before using Google, and you don’t have to register before using the BBC News site. At /dev/fort 2, since we were building the site from scratch and since it seemed like obviously the right thing to do, we used deferred registration, partly to convince ourselves that it really wasn’t that difficult; and partly so we could convince other people.